Hospicing Modernity: Parting with Harmful Ways of Living

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Hospicing Modernity invites us to participate in a form of fieldwork that connects the very sense of who ‘we’ are with global legacies of harm that modernity and coloniality have wrought. She asks us to imagine a future that is free of the cruel constraints of modernity and then pass through modernity’s death to embrace that future. The book is about the necessary expansion of our capacity for dealing with difficult and painful things, to sit in complexity and uncertainty, to show up to difficult conversations and to exist differently and, put frankly, to grow up.

It is fitting that the author is someone who genuinely has a foot outside of the tent of modernity and can bring a unique perspective to its study. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. For fans of adrienne maree brown, Sherri Mitchell, and Arundhati Roy, Hospicing Modernity challenges our assumptions and dares to ask more of us, for the sake of us all. It reaches deep inside us, filtering our view of the world, deciding what is possible and what is not, severing links with ancient wisdom and the diversity of human experience.This book is not simply a text, it demands reflection and interaction, providing tools and stories that help each of us understand our relationship with modernity. This book is not easy: it contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow, and gives no ready-made answers. We certainly need to escape its clutches and discover a kinder, more connected way of living in the world. The book “ Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism” was published in September 2021.

Drawing on and moving beyond traditions of radical pedagogy, such as those inspired by Paulo Freire, the author has created a powerful tool for uncovering, undoing, and recovering from the deadly ways in which modernity also lives and dies as humans experience it subjectively. Driven by expansion, colonialism, and resource extraction and propelled by neoliberalism and rabid consumption, our world is profoundly out of balance. The reader (and the world at large) must now make a choice: does our agency lie in tentatively plaiting the gloom we’re in, to make sense of our predicament and to try and grapple with it, or do we default to the brilliant intellect and its offer of comfortable certainty?By allowing modernity to expire gracefully within us, without judgement for its manifest failings, we halt its programme of violence and separation and open the space to reclaim a deeper understanding of what it is to be human. There are clues to how we find the paths that lead to the unknown world ahead, beyond the end of the world as we know it. It is the story of separation, of how humans have cut themselves off from the rest of life on planet Earth by believing that we can do precisely as we wish without repercussions. More chilling still is that modernity is not a philosophical abstract that we can dip into or opt-out of. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit.